Professor David Brophy brought the study of small businesses and private financial markets (now known as alternative, in contrast to publicly traded markets) to Michigan Ross and the state of Michigan before it was recognized as a legitimate area of study at top research universities. This process started in the mid-to-late seventies, and Brophy relentlessly created awareness in Michigan and educated students interested in this space. For over fifty decades, until his recent retirement, Brophy designed and taught all Michigan Ross venture capital and private equity courses.

In the article "The Core Competence of the Corporation," Professor C. K. Prahalad and his collaborator Gary Hamel introduced a groundbreaking idea about how companies succeed. 

They presented the idea that rather than just looking at the products they sell, companies should identify and nurture their core competencies -- the unique abilities and strengths that make them stand out. Those competencies are born from collective experience and knowledge in the company and combine different skills and technologies. Additionally, core competencies are not easy for competitors to copy, therefore giving companies a lasting edge in the market. 

In their article, Prahalad and Hamel cautioned companies not to get overly wrapped up in their current products, which might change with time. They advised that instead, companies should focus on understanding and enhancing their deep-rooted strengths as they pave the way for future innovations and market leadership. By recognizing and harnessing core competencies, companies can venture into new markets, innovate, and stay ahead of the competition. In simple terms, companies should know and recognize what they are genuinely good at and use that to shape their future.

In 1999, former Michigan Ross finance faculty member Josh Coval co-authored a paper that is among the top 50 most-cited papers in finance. The paper shows one of the most intriguing patterns in individual behavior. The strong bias in favor of domestic securities is a well-documented characteristic of international investment portfolios, yet this paper shows that the preference for investing close to home also applies to portfolios of domestic stocks. Specifically, U.S. investment managers strongly prefer locally headquartered firms, particularly small, highly leveraged firms that produce nontraded goods. These results suggest that asymmetric information between local and non-local investors may drive the preference for geographically proximate investments, and the relation between investment proximity and firm size and leverage may shed light on several well-documented asset pricing anomalies.

As the worlds of trade and culture were globalized in the 1980s, consumers worldwide saw standardized global brands enter and grow in their local markets, displacing local brands that had been dominant for decades. But what were consumers seeing in these global brands, and why were consumers switching to them? How could local brands fight back? These timely and important questions were addressed in a series of research papers by Michigan Ross Professor Rajeev Batra and his co-authors from 1999 through 2019. They showed that if consumers perceived brands as being global, they assumed these brands were of higher quality, capable of bestowing more prestige and status to their buyers, and would bring these buyers closer to the imagined lifestyles of consumers in the home countries of these brands. These papers have been cited over 6,000 times, have been nominated for and won multiple best-paper awards in journals and societies of international marketing, and have been included in lists of the 10 papers in the last 30 years that have made the most contribution to the international marketing literature. Today, as the lure of globalization seems to be receding and local brands seem to be winning again, this work highlights the tensions and trade-offs at play.

The Michigan Business Challenge is a prestigious business plan competition hosted by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. It allows U-M students to showcase their entrepreneurial ideas, receive feedback from experienced judges, and compete for over $100,000 in cash prizes to support their ventures. 

The Michigan Business Challenge was established in 1984 at Michigan Ross and has since become one of the region's most impactful and well-known startup competitions. Over the years, the MBC has supported numerous successful startups, generated millions of dollars in funding, and helped launch successful entrepreneurial careers for U-M students and alumni. The MBC is open to various stages of business concepts, from early-stage ideas to established businesses. 

The competition consists of three tracks that cater to specific industry sectors, including the Seigle Impact Track for social ventures, the Invention Track for ventures that have intellectual property at the core of their high-tech venture, and the Innovation Track for growing startups. These tracks provide tailored resources, networking opportunities, and funding for participants. Notable entrepreneurial ventures that have come through the MBC include Morning Brew, Xoran Technologies, AMBIQ Micro, Elevate K-12, and many more.

In 1984, former faculty member Birger Wernerfelt introduced a paradigm shift in business strategy with his paper "A Resource-Based View of the Firm." Prior to this transformative work, the discourse on business strategy was predominantly centered around external market factors and competitive forces. 

Wernerfelt challenged this conventional wisdom by presenting the argument that a firm's internal resources, ranging from tangible assets like machinery to intangible assets like reputation, could be the key to creating a competitive advantage. This theory, known as the Resource-Based View, asserts that for resources to offer a firm sustained competitive advantage, they must be valuable, rare, and difficult to substitute or imitate. 

The RBV has had profound implications and has changed how firms undertake strategic planning by emphasizing the importance of leveraging internal assets for competitive advantage. Wernerfelt's paper has been cited in thousands of academic publications and is now a staple in business school curricula worldwide.

From 1990-1993, Michigan Ross housed the Minority Summer Institute with support from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the Graduate Management Admission Council. MSI was designed to increase the number of minority faculty in business and management education. 

Each year, 30 Black, Hispanic, and Native American college students were selected to participate in MSI's six-week program. While at Ross, the students were involved in a series of classes, informational sessions, and presentations that provided a first-hand introduction to doctoral studies and the life and work of business professors. 

According to Dave Wilson, former president of GMAC, "When one thinks about changing the world, the MSI initiative must be seen as a resounding success." Following the last offering of MSI, the KPMG Foundation initiated the PhD Project, which has continued the mission of MSI. The PhD Project reports that the number of underrepresented business professors in the United States has risen from 294 in 1994 to more than 1,700 today.

The paper "Value of Information in Capacitated Supply Chains" by Professor Roman Kapuscinski and his co-authors was published in Management Science in 1999. This paper contributed significantly to the understanding of how information sharing impacts the performance of supply chains. Specifically, this paper turned on its head the notion that information would be most valuable in settings where capacity is tight, when the uncertainty of demand is huge, and when the costs of unsatisfying demand are very high. The paper uses careful, rigorous analyses to reveal when information is most valuable and how the value depends on many interrelated factors. Providing an innovative analytical model, Kapuscinski and his colleagues demonstrated when and how the sharing of demand information could remarkably enhance inventory management and order fulfillment for capacity-constrained supply chains. The subsequent literature in operations management has heavily referenced this pioneering work, leading to the development of practical strategies for improving supply chain efficiency through information sharing. Further studies have explored different facets of information sharing in diverse supply chain settings and have considered more complex forms of information, extending the paper's impact in many directions within operations. 

The research of Assistant Professor Eric Zou began with the observation that regulatory monitoring of pollution is often spatially sparse, temporally intermittent, or even nonexistent in developing-country settings. In a pair of papers titled "Unwatched Pollution: The Effect of Intermittent Monitoring on Air Quality" and "What's Missing in Environmental (Self-)Monitoring: Evidence from Strategic Shutdown of Pollution Monitors," Zou and his co-authors studied the strategic interaction between pollution monitoring and air quality. 

These two papers demonstrate that intermittency in regulatory monitoring causally affects pollution outcomes and vice versa -- high pollution can induce selective monitoring. The evidence highlights a general principle-agent challenge of environmental federalism: local agencies are in charge of self-monitoring and enforcing federal environmental standards. 

At the same time, these local agencies bear the regulatory penalties if their own data suggest that violations occurred. In a third paper titled "From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information," Zou and his co-authors found that pollution information disclosure triggered a dramatic change in public awareness of pollution issues, which in turn translated to increased avoidance behavior among members of the public and improved health. 

This paper is among the first to document social, behavioral, and health changes when a highly polluted country without publicly available pollution information transitions to a new regime that makes it possible to openly discuss pollution issues and to find and use pollution information in real time.

Professor C.K. Prahalad was the major pioneer and advocate of the 'bottom of the pyramid' proposition that selling to the poor can simultaneously be profitable and help eradicate poverty. While appealing, the BOP proposition is also controversial. Professor Aneel Karnani was an early and prominent critic of the BOP proposition. In his 2007 article "The Mirage of Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid" and his 2011 book Fighting Poverty Together: Rethinking Strategies for Business, Governments, and Civil Society to Reduce Poverty, he argues for an alternative perspective. Rather than viewing the poor primarily as consumers, it is better to focus on the poor as producers and to emphasize buying from the poor. Both the private sector and government have a critical role to play in alleviating poverty. The best way to alleviate poverty is to raise the real income of the poor by providing them appropriate employment opportunities. The private sector is the best engine of job creation. The government should facilitate the creation and growth of private enterprises in labor-intensive sectors of the economy. The government should also fulfill its traditional, accepted functions of providing adequate access to public services, such as education, public health, drinkable water, sanitation, security, and infrastructure.

"Co-creation as a revolutionary paradigm was introduced by Professors C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy in a series of articles published between 2000 and 2004 and an award-winning book, The Future of Competition. Their work provided a new frame of reference for jointly creating value through networked environments of increasingly digitalized experiences, going beyond goods and services, and called for a process of co-creation -- the practice of developing offerings, experiences, and unique value through ongoing interactions with customers, employees, managers, financiers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. Through their work, they envisioned an individual and experience-centric view of interactive value creation and innovation.

Starting in 2005, the explosion of digital and social media, the convergence of technologies and industries, embedded intelligence, and information technology-enabled services enabled enterprises to build platforms for large-scale, ongoing interactions among the firm, its customers, and its extended network. Ramaswamy's work argued that success lies in connecting with people's experiences to generate insights and change the nature and quality of interactions. He also called for co-creation from the inside out of enterprises and their networks, as much as co-creation from the outside in, and for leaders to co-create transformative pathways.

In 2014, Ramaswamy published "The Co-Creation Paradigm", which combined the core ideas of co-creation with a call to see, think, and act differently in an interconnected world of possibilities and complex challenges to co-create a better future as individuals."

Management and Organizations professors Sue Ashford and Jane Dutton invented the concept of "issue selling," arguing that most middle managers don’t simply wait for the organization’s strategy to come down from on high but also actively try to influence what that strategy might be. These active middle managers recognize that organizations have limited attentional capacity, and they try to influence what issues get on the organization’s agenda and gain the attention of top decision-makers for issues such as the need to be more ecologically sensitive, the experiences of gender mistreatment and other social issues. In other words, whereas the literature to that point had construed middle managers as passive recipients, these scholars gave them agency and engaged in several studies to better understand how they use that agency to affect bottom-up change. The impact of this idea can be seen in both the popularity of the advice given to middle managers derived from it and in its anticipation of the larger literature on social movements. Social movements were first studied outside of organizations in society, but scholars later proposed that such movements could also occur within organizations, as in issue selling.

In the book Build, Borrow, or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma the late Professor Will Mitchell and his co-author Laurence Capron developed a groundbreaking framework showing how firms can dynamically manage their resource portfolios and choose an appropriate growth strategy in turbulent market environments fraught with institutional, technological, and economic challenges. This comprehensive framework integrates the capability-based perspective with the principles of transaction cost economics. The intellectual origins of the capability-based perspective are deeply rooted in the foundational work in the strategy field carried out at the University of Michigan around 1980. Mitchell's foundational framework has not only shaped the research agendas of scholars interested in central questions in corporate strategy but also influenced practitioners who are faced with the perpetual strategic conundrum of how best to grow their firms.

Franchised chains have an outsize influence on the economy: firms involved in a variety of business activities are organized as franchised chains and they employed over 9.6 million workers in the United States in 2017 according to the Census Bureau. Professor Francine Lafontaine's pioneering work on franchising shows that the success of this organizational form across various sectors results from the franchisor and franchisee specializing in the activities they are best suited to. Specifically, the franchisor specializes in creating and supporting the business format and brand, where scale is especially beneficial, and the franchisee optimizes operations locally, where their knowledge and efforts are particularly valuable. Lafontaine's work in this area has informed the choices that franchisors make and the nature of the contracts they use, and also the debate over legislation that aims to address the alleged shortcomings of the franchising organizational form. 

Her work suggests caution in developing potential public policy changes as consumers, existing and potential franchisees, as well as their employees stand to lose in the long term if franchising becomes less competitive as a form of organization. More broadly, Lafontaine's research has made seminal contributions to our understanding of how firms interact with each other in the process of procuring inputs or distributing their products, and prompted her appointment as Director of the Bureau of Economics at the FTC in 2014-15. In particular, her research has shown that factors driving vertical integration and vertical contracting can be very different from those motivating horizontal mergers, so analyses of vertical mergers should start from a different premise compared to analyses of horizontal mergers. Her detailed analyses of franchise contract terms, as described in her book The Economics of Franchising, provide further reasons why, in her view, the rule of reason continues to be the right approach in antitrust cases involving vertical restraints.

Every innovation or new product development team faces a fundamental tension: When does one transition from the ideation to the execution phase? Too early a transition risks missing a great yet unrealized idea, and too late a transition risks being unable to bring the product to market on time. This significant and ubiquitous tension poses a challenge for researchers because of the nuanced nature of imagination and creativity and the need to combine that with creating an actual item based on one’s designs. In “Ideation-Execution Transition in Product Development: An Experimental Analysis” (Management Science, 2018) by Michigan Ross Professors Stephen Leider and William Lovejoy, as well as their colleague Evgeny Kagan from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, the authors use a novel experimental design to reveal some expected outcomes (later transitions do not change mean performance but increase variance and risk significantly) and some unexpected ones (it is not so much the timing of the transition that drives mean performance, but rather who has decision rights). Specifically, designers should not make the transition decision; the timing should be an exogenously imposed constraint. This external requirement significantly changes designers’ behaviors and results.

The Carson Scholars Program at Michigan Ross is a signature feature of the Ross BBA Program and a result of the vision and generosity of David Carson, BBA '55. Carson, the former president of People's Savings Bank in Connecticut, was recognized by Forbes as one of the 500 most powerful people in the corporate United States. Based on his experiences throughout his career, Carson realized that future business leaders should understand how government works to develop effective corporate strategies for participating in the public policy arena. As a result, CSP enables Ross undergraduates to augment their on-campus learning with study in Washington, D.C., where they meet with elected officials, government experts, industry leaders, issue advocates, and lobbyists. Since its foundation in 2005, the program has enabled more than 1,000 alumni to learn about the public policy process from these experts.